you have a shell (putty or cygwin/ssh or a commercial product) for emacs, another shell for tailing the log
Real emacs users put all the shells they want within emacs itself. :) Besides tail -f log I usually have psql and nscp, plus miscellanea like find, ftp, ... (Then use gnuserv so your workspace maintains itself if you are working remotely.) You could even use the emacs w3 web browser for the admin pages and api-doc. Depending on the complexity of what you are building you will probably have to test that in IE though. :)
(Btw, I'm partial to tera term for ssh on win32 though I know many people who like you prefer putty.)
I do use Eclipse but only because, despite how good the emacs JDE is, it's still not as good as Eclipse for java development. Which one would hope would be the case really, given the amount of man-hours that have gone into Eclipse/java. When a similar amount of effort goes into Eclipse tools for OACS development maybe I will use it for that too, but I don't see that happening any time soon. :)
